Age of Ambition (51 page)

The prospect that Han Han was a confection dreamt up by his father and publisher was, in theory, plausible—or, at least, not much odder than Bo Xilai's wife poisoning a British businessman, or a railway boss with so much stolen cash that it was moldering. In all honesty, some part of me wanted the accusations to be true because it would've made one hell of a story. Twice I met Chinese writers who said they knew of one of “Han Han's ghostwriters,” but when I followed the trails, they led nowhere. I had interviewed his father and concluded that either he and his son were magnificent actors or the theory was a fantasy. I decided that Han Han was most likely what he appeared to be: a writer who had been sculpted by the attentions of his marketing team, but not a fraud.

It seemed to me that many of Han Han's critics were raging less against him than against the moment he embodied. To the accusers such as the truth-hunter Fang Zhouzi, who called Han a “false idol,” Han's success was a taunt to the classical credentials of intellectual life, because he churned out work at a furious pace, feeding the market with writing that was undercooked. To other critics, Han Han was a fair-weather critic who had shown himself to be too willing to back off the call for change when the risks became too great; after Han Han declined to speak up against Ai Weiwei's detention, their relationship soured, and the artist described the writer as “too acquiescent.” I saw, in these critiques, a common root: people had projected what they wanted to see onto Han Han, and then he had defied their projections. In that sense, he was the ultimate amateur, an icon of Me Generation individualist politics. The more I saw his face peering out from bus shelters and subway ads, the more I was reminded of the soldier Lei Feng, the old socialist poster boy. Willingly or not, Han Han had become a kind of Lei Feng in denim—a bearer of a faith that no man could fulfill.

When I stopped by to see Han Han for the last time, in the spring of 2013, I sensed that his years of bearing that faith had taken a toll on him. After all the dancing in shackles—the shuttered magazine, the warnings from the Party—he had moved his office to a quiet villa, shared by small technology companies, in a residential complex in Shanghai. He was running a start-up that produced an Android app called One, which sent users one item a day—a story, a poem, a video. It had attracted three million subscribers in its first six months, but it was obscure enough to avoid the attentions of the Central Propaganda Department. “Since I'm not allowed to do a magazine, we turned it into an app,” he told me. We were in a small sunlit conference room on the top floor of the house; below us, roomfuls of young employees were at computers, working amid the stuffed animals, Ping-Pong tables, and other trappings of start-up life. Han Han said he spent most of his time playing with his daughter and racing his cars. Looking at him in his latest incarnation, the bad-boy author in retirement, I asked him why he had stopped writing about corruption, injustice, and other sensitive subjects. “We have Weibo now. People can find anything they need on there,” he said. “I rarely write about politics. For me, it's boring now.”

“Boring?” I asked.

“Because the same bad things happen again, again, and again. As a writer, you don't want to repeat yourself. I have other ways to express my anger. Or I can choose not to express it at all.”

*   *   *

Depending on the point of view, the arc of Han Han's writing life was either encouraging or dispiriting. When I met him he had been edging toward a collision with the Party, but over the years he and the system had found a way to accommodate each other. His work had far less impact in China than it once did, but it was hard to criticize him for choosing a quieter path; the Party had left little mystery about the perils of uncompromising aspiration—which made it only more striking to me when people who had failed in a bid for greater autonomy chose to go once more into the fray. At one point, in March 2010, I received an invitation to a ceremony in downtown Beijing: the editor Hu Shuli was heading back into the business of muckraking. Less than four months after she had broken with her publisher, she rented a hotel ballroom and packed it with reporters and officials and scholars. She was launching a media group, accompanied by many of the editors and reporters who had followed her out the door from
Caijing
. In a feisty gesture, she named her new venture
Caixin
, which sounded, in Chinese, like “the new
Caijing
.”

I took a seat in the crowd and watched Hu step to the podium. She wore a red sequined jacket. She was barely tall enough to be seen over the flower arrangement around the microphone. In a high-pitched voice, she said, “Our editorial policy of objectively covering major economic and social developments in China will not change.” Her new venture gave her the share of equity she had always wanted; she and her editors held 30 percent ownership; a group of investors and a relatively progressive Chinese newspaper called
Zhejiang Daily
owned the rest. Being in business with a state-run newspaper carried its own risks, but as the months passed, she gained confidence that
Zhejiang Daily
would live up to its pledge to give her latitude to run her newsroom.

I watched, over the next couple of years, as Hu and her staff strained to reestablish themselves. After the initial excitement over the founding, many reporters left for better salaries or more established news organizations. She made risky bets. At one point, she expanded into a broadcast arm that was too costly and complex, and she abandoned it; people in the newsroom took to calling it Hu's “Great Leap Forward.” Still, she continued. The staff broke influential stories about financial fraud and official abuses; in one case, officials in charge of the one-child policy were found to be profiting by confiscating babies and selling them to orphanages for foreign adoptions. Hu wrote blistering editorials that challenged the Party's fundamental argument that democracy is prone to instability. “It is autocracy that creates chaos,” she wrote during the Middle East uprising, “while democracy breeds peace. Supporting an autocracy is in reality trading short-term interests for long-term costs.”

But as bold as it was, Hu Shuli's voice no longer stood out as distinctively as it had when she launched her first magazine twelve years earlier, simply because so many other voices now contended alongside hers. The corporate misdeeds and corruption that had been the main targets of her work were now revealed, day by day, by ordinary people who had no tools but an Internet connection. Tycoons who once gave exclusive interviews to Hu Shuli were now taking to the Web to express themselves. Even Hu's old magazine,
Caijing
, had rebuilt itself. The publisher Wang Boming—sensing, perhaps, that his glory as a press baron was imperiled—promised readers that he would resist “inappropriate controls from above,” and the magazine kept up its focus on investigations. In that sense, Hu Shuli's departure had not stymied investigative reporting; it had doubled the volume of it.

*   *   *

In the spring of 2013, Sarabeth and I began preparing to leave Beijing. After eight years, we wanted the chance to think about China with the help of some distance. We would miss it immensely, and we would be back, but it was time. We started saying goodbye to friends, and I made my last visit to the office of Hu Shuli. Over the years, I had come to see her as a kind of heart monitor for the intellectual life of Beijing; her pulse quickened or slowed to a crawl depending on the pressures and opportunities surrounding independent thought.

When I arrived, the newsroom at Caixin was emptier than the last time I had seen it. I knew that young reporters were slipping away for more glamorous or rewarding jobs. Her office was functional, and sparsely furnished. I asked her if it was getting easier or harder to be a muckraker in China, and she acknowledged the proliferation of competition. “When I started
Caijing
, the problem was that there was nothing to quote! There was only
Caijing
!” she said. Now there are too many things to quote, and you have to decide which is true. So we want to be influential and comprehensive—a trusted source.” That was a niche in a society short on trust.

Can you survive on that? I asked.

“It depends on the overall situation in China. If China can change, and the future is bright, we can survive, and grow fast.” She left the alternative unsaid, and thought for a moment. Then she continued: “I think it's difficult for China to turn back, so I'm still hopeful.” She was now teaching classes part time at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, and the contact with young people had energized her. “In the university, students ask me, ‘We know being a journalist is difficult, so why do you encourage us to be journalists?' I say that if everyone knows it's hard and you insist on doing it anyway, you will get success. Everybody is afraid of it, so they don't compete.”

For her, the decision to start over had been about more than the business of publishing. She was faithful to the ideas that had animated her from the beginning. “We didn't want death; we wanted life again,” she said. “These young people are very confident and optimistic, and they are leading me. They are all between the ages of about thirty and forty. They are all start-up oriented. They are confident, and they believe in the future. They don't just trust me; they trust in the future. That is not only pressure for me, but also encouragement. They said, ‘Why don't we start it ourselves? We can start it again.'” She grinned and said, “Of course, for me it's a lot of pressure. But you need to choose sometimes.”

 

TWENTY-THREE

TRUE BELIEVERS

 

Tang Jie, the patriot, was restless again. In the years since his nationalist video lifted him out of anonymity, he'd lived in Shanghai, Berlin, and Beijing—and barely six months after joining m4, the production company in the capital, he was planning something larger. He wanted to broaden his work from criticizing Western media to criticizing Chinese media as well, and to commenting on politics. He wanted to elevate his punditry beyond the ordinary online scrum to a level that he called “independent media.” His cofounders disagreed; they worried that moving beyond a narrow focus would get them shut down. “But for me and the others, we pay close attention to this country and its problems—and that means politics,” Tang told me. “
Politics
shares a root with
policy
and
police
, and if you're talking about the rise of a country, it's impossible to avoid the subject. For young people like us, if we don't talk about politics, what do we talk about?”

In August 2011 he walked out with ten members of the staff and launched a new site, named Dujiawang—“Unique Web”—with an ambitious new slogan: “Rise Together with China.” In the four years I'd known him, China's online population had doubled—it was now half a billion people—and he wanted to be the Chinese nationalist YouTube. “We want to be more than just an attitude,” he said. Tang Jie found an angel investor and raised three million yuan (about half a million dollars) to finance the operation, and he rented a suite of offices in the technology corridor of the capital, next door to the headquarters of the search engine Baidu. He and his colleagues converted a room into a studio for broadcasting interviews and lectures over the Web. To give it a studious look, they found a photograph of a library in Dublin and blew it up to cover the wall as a backdrop.

Their videos examined the Chinese space program and the European debt crisis; Goldman Sachs, Greece, and gun control. They were as suspicious of the West as ever; they criticized the editor Hu Shuli for her calls for political reform and said that bringing liberal democracy to China would be like pasting “a fake Western painting” on top of “an authentic work of calligraphy.” Even by China's standards, Tang Jie's nationalism was extreme. At one point, he criticized the state news service for being too soft, and one of its reporters called him a “fifty-center,” a reference to the loyal “ushers of public opinion.” The state news service called you a shill for the government? I asked. “Correct,” he said, grinning. “We thought that was a bit ridiculous.”

I'd met wealthy Chinese businessmen who invested in sites like his; in his case, his investor wanted to remain anonymous. “Three million yuan isn't much to him. You couldn't even get an apartment in Beijing with that,” Tang said, adding, “We wanted to make a profit, and initially our investor thought we could.” But that had proved difficult: in April 2012 the news of the Bo Xilai murder scandal alarmed Party censors, and they unleashed such a broad campaign against online political discussion that it extended to Tang's patriotic website. He received a notice from the Internet Affairs Bureau to shut down for a month for “reorganization.” When we talked, he put the best face on it that he could. “‘Reorganization' means you have to tell them about yourselves, about who is in management, and they make records of it all, and then you can get back to work,” he said. “We understood that they had to do this, or the political commentary would rush in like a flood.” He went on: “It was frustrating, but we never stopped working. Even though our own site was shut down, we could send our videos all over the place to other sites.”

“Did you think the shutdown was justified?” I asked, and he considered the question.

“I thought they were going too far. There were too many websites shut down,” he said, adding, “Of course we hope the atmosphere can be freer. But ‘freer' is a very abstract concept … We have to stay constructive.”

Tang Jie kept the faith. One month of “reorganization” became two, and two became three. His investor lost heart and shut down his funding. Tang Jie began to worry about paying rent and salaries. Finally, in September, five months after it was blocked, his site was allowed back online—just in time for him to help defend what the government called “sacred territory” in the East China Sea—five small islands and three rocks known, in Chinese, as the Diaoyu Islands. Home to moles and albatrosses, but no human inhabitants, they lay far out to sea. Japan controlled them, but China maintained that it was their rightful owner. For decades the dispute had lain dormant, but the islands were suspected to sit atop valuable oil and gas deposits, and bit by bit, the conflict was turning physical.